Resource Scheduling in Edge Computing: A Survey

TLDR

Edge computing has emerged to meet the growing demand for data communication and computing driven by IoT and wireless networks, offering proximity‑based services that enhance communication, storage, and networking, and its success hinges on effective resource scheduling, which has become a focal research area. This survey reviews the current state of research on edge‑computing resource scheduling, examines its real‑world relevance, and identifies open challenges and future research directions. The authors describe the edge‑computing architecture, present a unified model covering computation offloading, resource allocation, and provisioning, and compare centralized and distributed scheduling techniques along with key performance indicators.

Abstract

With the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the wide penetration of wireless networks, the surging demand for data communications and computing calls for the emerging edge computing paradigm. By moving the services and functions located in the cloud to the proximity of users, edge computing can provide powerful communication, storage, networking, and communication capacity. The resource scheduling in edge computing, which is the key to the success of edge computing systems, has attracted increasing research interests. In this paper, we survey the state-of-the-art research findings to know the research progress in this field. Specifically, we present the architecture of edge computing, under which different collaborative manners for resource scheduling are discussed. Particularly, we introduce a unified model before summarizing the current works on resource scheduling from three research issues, including computation offloading, resource allocation, and resource provisioning. Based on two modes of operation, i.e., centralized and distributed modes, different techniques for resource scheduling are discussed and compared. Also, we summarize the main performance indicators based on the surveyed literature. To shed light on the significance of resource scheduling in real-world scenarios, we discuss several typical application scenarios involved in the research of resource scheduling in edge computing. Finally, we highlight some open research challenges yet to be addressed and outline several open issues as the future research direction.